As described in Chapter 1, Introduction to Pentaho Reporting, Pentaho Reporting is a suite of open source tools, including Report Designer, Reporting Engine, and Reporting SDK. All the preceding tools are written in pure Java, allowing any operating system that supports the Java runtime environment to run the application. The latest version of Pentaho Reporting, the 8th, requires the use of JDK 8 or more recent version.

Pentaho Reporting tools are cross-platform applications and will run in Linux, Windows, macOS, and other Java supported environments. The Reporting Engine is backward compatible with previous versions of JDK, but it is always recommended to use the latest one.

As stated in the introduction, in this chapter we are going to focus our attention on Pentaho Report Designer. The discussion on Pentaho Reporting SDK will...

As you can expect, the first task for our goal is to download Pentaho Report Designer from the correct website. The distribution packages are available in a couple of places: on the SourceForge website (https://sourceforge.net/projects/pentaho) and directly on the official Pentaho website (http://community.pentaho.com/projects/reporting). In every case, the distribution packages are free for downloading and no fee or costs should be asked.

If you choose to download Pentaho Report Designer from the official Pentaho website, an automatic redirect will send you to the SourceForge website. To find the right distribution in the SourceForge website, follow the Report Designer folder in the Files repository. There you will find one subfolder for each version. Choose the latest available, in our case version 8.0.

In the distribution...

Now that you have Pentaho Report Designer installed in your environment and you know how to launch it, let's move another step forward, introducing the user interface. After launching the Pentaho Report Designer, you will notice the following six main graphical components. All together, the components work with the unique goal to create the report. From the top left to the bottom right of the window, you can recognize:

• The menu and toolbar, where you can request the execution of all the possible actions on reports
• The report element palette, where you can select report elements for your report
• The report canvas tab panel, which displays your report
• The report explorer panel, with the Structure and Data tabs, displaying the entire report in object tree form
• The element properties...

Now that you have successfully installed Pentaho Report Designer and you are more confident with the user interface, in this section, you will walk through building a first complete report. The report you are going to develop will list all the products in the catalog defined in the SampleData schema and more precisely, stored in the PRODUCTS table.  Before you begin, create a directory called my_reports on your laptop, to manage the files you will develop in this book.

Now that the Report Design Wizard has completed its job, you have a fully featured report in your Pentaho Report Designer. The following screenshot shows what the user interface looks like:

Before any other task, let's update the title and subtitles to make them more meaningful. To modify the title, double-click on the Report Title text and replace the content with My first report. After this, double-click on SubTitle 1 and SubTitle 2 and remove the text in both. At the end of the changes, the titles should look like the following screenshot...